Program Evaluation : A Practical Guide for Social Work and the Helping Professions

A streamlined guide to program evaluation that focuses on practical techniques for working with individuals, couples, and families. It gradually builds skills through real-life scenarios, review questions, and current examples, while also addressing cultural sensitivity in assessing and improving professional practices.

How do you uncomplicate the subject of program evaluation for students without being too simplistic? David Royse focuses on what readers really need to understand in order to apply useful program evaluation techniques in their practice serving individual clients, couples, and families. Drawing on decades of teaching this subject, he skillfully takes an incremental approach to teaching so that students aren''t overwhelmed by information that they won''t necessarily use in professional settings. He develops readers'' interest in each new chapter''s topic by incorporating real-life scenarios, excerpts from articles on program evaluation, and his own personal experiences in assessing and evaluating programs.

Each chapter contains suggestions for additional reading and examples from current literature. These interesting-to-read segments not only show students that program evaluators and practitioners actually use these techniques, but they also gently expand readers'' knowledge of the field. Helpful features such as review questions and skill assessments are found at the end of each chapter. This text is also unique in the amount of coverage it provides on cultural sensitivity—ways of understanding the concept and assessing its presence (or absence) among employees in agencies.

Highly accessible and practical in its approach, this book is designed for undergraduates or graduate students in social work, counseling, and health-related programs and available for adoption in-classroom, online, or hybrid courses.